Category: Coloring

Since I wasn’t stamping anything, I had to turn to my old reliable Johanna Basford to do some coloring and practice. This is from (obviously) Ivy and the Inky Butterfly where I decided to do a rainbow in the main circle in the drawing. This is how it turned out:

I liked how this turned out especially since I didn’t really have a plan of which colors to use when i started. I used Polychromos pencils here and just did a bunch of overlapping gradients to create this. The transition from orange to yellow isn’t as gradual as I’d like so I’ll probably go back and touch that up.

Are you still creating, crafting or coloring? Can you do it for five minutes? If you can, do it. It’s worth the time.

I was doing some coloring in my copy of Lost Ocean and after doing a four color pencil gradient on a fish, I stood back and looked at it and thought, “Wow. That’s really good!” These moments of “Wow! I don’t suck!” don’t happen that often, so it’s good to share them when they do.

I finally had a chance to finish the January 2018 page from the Impress calendar.

Impress Cards & Crafts (a Seattle rubber stamp and papercraft store) always puts out a yearly calendar which fits in a plastic case that looks something like a CD case and it comes in two sizes. If you have a usable case from a previous year, you can buy just the pre-printed inserts for the next year.

Now, if the lions look a little funny, that’s not your imagination. When I stamped them, they weren’t as dark as I wanted them and so I re-inked and stamped again. Normally, when using a MISTI, you’re able to do this, but this time, without my knowing, the paper shifted in the tool so when I re-stamped the image, I got a double vision, blurry looking image. I ended up taking a Sakura Micron pen and filling in the areas which should be black lines and was able to salvage this page. I would show you the mis-stamped images but trust me, you don’t need that kind of eye strain.

I finished this off with stippling and Polychromos pencils. Onto February!

There’s a new set from Mama Elephant called Lion Dance that is based on the Lunar New Year celebration in China, so besides children holding lamps, there are three lions in the set and here I color one of them in time lapse using Polychromos colored pencils. The paper I’m using here is Neenah Solar White 80 lb. I’ve seen this paper recommended on several craft blogs and craft YouTube channels and so far I like it. I cut a single 8.5 x 11 sheet into eight artist’s trading cards and that’s what I ended up stamping on. Again, the ink that I’m using is Memento Tuxedo Black.

Initially I started with three colors and then added another three to achieve the final effect that I was happy with, or as I like to say, until I got it to the point where I didn’t hate it.

The dragons in this set were made for coloring and especially colored pencils. I’ll probably do a lot more with these before mid-February.

I was making a belated birthday card for a friend tonight and thought I would record the creation of it so you could see how the whole thing fits together.

As I showed in a previous post, I started with the Mama Elephant Otterly Adorable stamp set as well as the Memory Box Friends and Flowers stamp set and then created the small white cardstock section using images from those sets. I then colored it.

I then took a pumpkin orange card blank from my collection (I’m using it up! YAY!) and put a piece of Lawn Fawn Perfectly Plaid Fall paper on it. I cut the patterned paper a half inch smaller than the card size, so the plaid paper was 5″ by 3.75″.

I then went through my folder of scraps and found a piece of paper I could put vertically across the right side of the card, adhered that (running out of runner tape – I’m so embarrassed), then put down the stamped piece.

Inside the card was a glued in die cut using the Lawn Fawn Gift Card Pop Up die. Once cut and folded, you glued this die cut into the crease of the card and when it’s opened the gift card will stick straight up. It’s really fun.

Here is part two of the artist trading card I recently did with a Christmas theme. Again I have done the coloring in time lapse to speed things up. The time lapse of the coloring lasts about a minute and it took me maybe 15 to do. To be honest, I didn’t time myself on the regular coloring part because I was just enjoying the process of coloring and didn’t want to constrain myself by keeping a stopwatch running.

I then used a stipple brush and some Tim Holtz Distress Ink Lucky Clover to add some extra green shading to the edges so it wouldn’t look quite so plain. I have other stipple brushes of varying sizes that are all at least 15 years old so they last. I know that Tsukineko still makes some stipple brushes and my local craft store has some brushes that look like this so if you’d like to try this technique it should be easy and relatively inexpensive to get your hands on some of these brushes. I will probably touch on these brushes again in future.

The background is a piece of green cardstock I got at Michael’s. Once in a while their standard letter sized cardstock packs go on sale for as low as $2 per packet so that’s when I buy colored cardstock if I’m running low. It’s not heavy stock but it works for what I use it for.

Finally I added a little sweater patterned paper from the Lawn Fawn Knit Picky pad. This comes in 12×12 and 6×6 inch versions. I used the smaller pad size since I didn’t want to cut a small bit out of a 12×12 page.

I hope you enjoyed this. Please let me know if you liked this and if I should do more artist trading cad videos.